PP: It’s really interesting that you mention the lack of scientific funding after the Cold War. The eminent economic historian Philip Mirowski has noted this time and again. In his books he writes about how scientists found themselves increasingly in oversupply as the Cold War ran down and spending on military research dwindled. He contends that much of the ‘mathematicisation’ of modern economics – that is, the move away from realistic theories that help the public purpose and into ‘pure’ models that don’t really do or say anything – was due to this emigration from the hard sciences. Clearly without the threat of the ‘Evil Empire’ Western governments no longer see as much need to spend on expensive research. I mean, while I’m not hugely keen on the military-industrial complex, at least a lot of this research ended up serving the public purpose when it was released by the military.

"IN 2007, the great ship of the American economy began encountering darkening skies. In 2008, it was suddenly faced with a violent storm which blew it miles off course, well south of where it ought to have been. The country's leaders didn't know how far from their charted path they'd been swept, but they recognised a need to make a course correction. Now, three years later, a look at the maps tells us that the storm was more powerful than previously believed, and it left the vessel much farther south than anyone had expected. The course corrections made earlier? Far too small to bring the ship back to its previous path. Yet none of America's leaders are trying to steer the ship back northward. Indeed, many seem anxious to yank on the tiller and drag the economy farther south still."

Something rankles about Quiggin’s plainspoken conclusion, despite the able history of ideas and the enjoyable skewering of some disingenuous beliefs. His book doesn’t seem to take its lovely, lurid starting point as anything more than a hook. There is a rich tradition of zombies as figures of capitalism, perhaps most gloriously in George Romero’s film Dawn of the Dead. Lumbering automatons stripped down to the most ingrained habits, his living dead recall nothing but ceaseless consumption. They can only return to the mall’s torpid palace of commodities: they are blank, mindless, their arms outstretched for sustenance. The disease that has captured them is not a local phenomenon; as with countless other versions of the allegory, it is everywhere. Dawn of the Dead was made in 1978 and cannot be adduced either to the Keynesian or neoliberal era; it is not a withering critique of one importunate variant of modern economics but a total allegory.

The book’s other seductively lucid schema concerns the history of structural crises, which follow an alternating pattern. The authors count four in the “long twentieth century”: the first “great depression” in the 1890s, the Great Depression, the 1970s collapse and the current morass. The first and third they identify as crises of profitability; the second and fourth, crises of “financial hegemony.” In these periods the profit rate is relatively stable, but the unchecked power of the upper echelons allows for unsustainable demands. They are gilded ages, perhaps; yet every such age gilds not the lily but the tulip: they are built out of bubbles. With the wealthy unwilling and the poor unable to support the mountain of social debt, the bubble eventually pops. This is, for our authors, the nature of the present crisis, and it is from here we must seek a way forward.

The current catastrophe is a rare creature, to be sure. But it is not a black swan; it is a zombie. It is the last crisis come calling, and the one before that and before that again—not just returned but fortified by the intervening years and the deferral of a reckoning. This crisis that keeps returning, now dressed in finery, now in rags, is evidently not a monster sprung from one particular deviation. Global crisis is, increasingly, the unnatural natural state of modern capital. It will not be laid to rest by fiddling with the alignment of parts, much less returning to a previous mode—these parts, these modes, are what set it shambling forward, hungry, blindly grasping, in the first place.

The gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business, and reflected the voices and ideas of people in institutions more than those of everyday Americans, according to a new study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Over recent decades, the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded practitioners of what might be called the bourgeois theorisation of the current crisis.

So far, so good. Except, there's a hole. That hole is that the Fed hasn't followed the simple "Taylor rule." In fact, there's been a significant gap between Taylor rule and interest rates. Or more exactly, two of them.

The first was between 1994 and 1998 -- the Fed was consistently above the Taylor rule. This lead several more left-leaning economists to call for lower interest rates to get more growth. The second was between 2001 and 2008 - the Fed was consistently below the Taylor rule. What a coincidence. So the argument that the Fed was a transparent carrier of the economic demand for funds breaks down. The other point is that there is a simple explanation for all three - short term rates, inflation, and budget deficits moving in tandem over the last 10 years, namely that they represent the same thing, not a market that is clearing, but three different forms of the same thing, namely, risk aversion.

The reality is that Federal Reserve interest rates, government bond auctions, and federal budget deficits all have one thing in common: they aren't markets in the sense of "many independent actors making independent decisions." The Fed's decision is in the hands of a few people, most of the buyers of government treasuries is a small number of large players, and of course, the Federal budget deficit is written by a few hundred people and their staff members. These are not large markets, but small ones. Hillary was pilloried for saying that it takes a village to raise a child; but the evidence here -given that the results of the last 10 years have been a market crash, a terrible recovery, and a massive global downturn- is that it took "The Village" to raze the economy.

We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.

I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.

ity to really care about the place they called home. It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore. This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark. Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings. A quadrillion is just off the charts, out of this world, not really subject to reality-based interpretation. You might as well say "infinity." We have flown up our own collective numeric bung-hole.

While extremely allergic to paranoid memes and conspiracy theories, I begin to wonder about the impressive volume of World Wide Web chatter about an upcoming bank holiday -- meaning that the US government might find itself constrained to shut down the banking system for a period of time to deal with a rapidly developing emergency that might prompt the public to make a run on reserves. God knows, there are enough black swans crowding the skies these days to blot out the sun. I hesitate to suggest that readers who are able to should consider stealthily withdrawing a month's worth of walking-around money from their accounts. The week past, some so-called "conservative" political action groups (read:brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests) trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at "town meetings" around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. It's one thing to yell at a congressman over "single payer" abstractions. It'll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First National Bank of Chiggerville.

THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.By Justin FoxTHE SAGES Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets By Charles R. Morris

Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.

The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who doesn’t lay a glove on Taibbi in this attack, is unintentionally revealing of a certain strain of financial journalism thinking:

Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don’t offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.

“Financial meltdowns don’t offer villains?” Does anyone believe that?

And wait a minute: Are we really so sure that “one group,” Wall Street, was not central to this crisis and that its increasing influence over government at all levels—what gives, for instance, with ex-Goldmanite Neil Levin deciding as New York State banking commissioner in 2000 not to regulate credit default swaps as insurance?—was not decisive? And isn’t Goldman Wall Street’s leading firm?

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.